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I am a bit late on this thread.... The most important issue to consider and keep in mind is what fundamentally a laptop is all about. Laptops are about MOBILE PRODUCTIVITY. IMNSHO... the TP701 & TP560, and as well the Compaq Armada and the Digital HighNote VP are significant achievements for they maintain the optimum form factor. The 701 was the first REAL player, but unfortunately IBM seems to have taken a lateral instead of going the distance with the 560. Compaq and Digital are playing catch up, and made pretty good units as well. All are essentially light in weight, hovering about 4 lb., have enough resources to do most work and are reasonable on batteries. Its really too bad that ZD is almost as big as Microsloth in editorial power. Their claims of a laptop having as much power as desktops, or at least that they are approaching that threshold is really unfortunate. The techno-newbies eat that crap up and with money burning a hole in their pockets drive the price of laptops up and their availability down. Laptops will NEVER approach the power or functionality of a desktop. If you are on a limited budget, and fully realize the limitations of a laptop, fine, great, you are on the ball. You get a cookie. If you find yourself running multiple apps and using a laptop like a desktop you are better off with a desktop. The premium for a laptop is almost twice the cost of a desktop or more, save your bread, buy a nice monitor and enjoy the comforts of a real chair. If you REALLY need to carry the CDROM AND FLOPPY and an EXTRA battery to keep these devils fed then somewhere you are doing something wrong. The days of the suitcase computers unfortunately dwindling. What a novel concept these days to stuff a desktop into a mobile case and have a real computer to carry and park for your presentation or investigation session. They might make a come back with the realized reality of bigger LCD screens. I can't begin to tell you all how many people I see on the train playing freaking Solitare for their ride. Or better yet, using their CDROMS to play audio CD's. Man if you are toting around a $4k deck of cards or a really bad CD player, you probably have the quarter to buy a clue. As an engineer, for the most part, the most strenuous duty I would ever really expect my laptop to do is run video capture, data logging and PowerPoint type presentations. The rest is Word and Excel to get a jump on my day and make use of the hours that I spend commuting. Yes, I can run things like Autocad on the go, there were few occasions where it was 'handy' on my 701 but what a pain in the ass. I use little DOS engineering analysis applettes, but for the most part my 'tools' are spreadsheets and Mathematica workbooks on the go. The laptop side of the computer industry is for the most part playing catch up with the desktop market and battery technology. It always has, it always will. You can not reasonably expect a laptop to really compete against a desktop plugged into the wall. Period! We might see a PPro in a laptop, or a Klamath, but you might as well save up for the Go-Go-Gadget Pocket Fusion Reactor to keep those buggers fed as well. My two bits Dennis